Re:2018 MacBook Pro Review
by llampx on Monday July 16, 2018 @04:46AM
(#17539697)
> Nobody asked for USB ports when they had serial/parallel ports, or for the floppy drive to disappear, or to lose the VGA connector.
I remember all of these technologies, and they all had major pain points. Serial and parallel ports were slow and needed tuning to work with IRQ/DMA (don't quote me on this), floppies were slow and unreliable and VGA was blurry on LCD monitors.
There's no current replacement for USB that does the job better. Nothing for HDMI. Same for SD cards. Nobody was asking to get rid of these ports so that they could use the next big thing. Apple had Thunderbolt 2 co-existing with USB on their older laptops, they could do the same with the newer ones. In fact, USB-C charging is limited to 100W, so 15" MacBook Pros run at their limit could power-throttle or lose charge when running intensive workloads.
I remember all of these technologies, and they all had major pain points. Serial and parallel ports were slow and needed tuning to work with IRQ/DMA (don't quote me on this), floppies were slow and unreliable and VGA was blurry on LCD monitors.
There's no current replacement for USB that does the job better. Nothing for HDMI. Same for SD cards. Nobody was asking to get rid of these ports so that they could use the next big thing. Apple had Thunderbolt 2 co-existing with USB on their older laptops, they could do the same with the newer ones. In fact, USB-C charging is limited to 100W, so 15" MacBook Pros run at their limit could power-throttle or lose charge when running intensive workloads.